Tag: cats and New Mexico weather

House Woman

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No, I didn’t take that picture. I wish!

I pulled it from here and I’m hoping no one will mind. Once I snap a picture of our own little house wren, I’ll swap it out.

He or she – apparently the males and females look much the same – has been busily building a nest inside the cow skull hanging outside our front door. She goes in the top, (we’ll just decide it’s a she), through the cannula where the spinal cord would exit and has stuff the brain cavity with hair, grass and bits of floss pulled from the seams of the patio chair cushions.

Pretty styling actually.

At first I thought this was a bad idea. Disaster waiting to happen. But it turns out she knows what she’s doing. House wrens will steal other birds’ nests. She’s tiny, but she’s aggressive. She doesn’t mind us coming and going and she tells Isabel off if she gets too close.

I like a bird who takes care of herself.

I finished and sent in my line edits for Petals and Thorns last night. That was the third and final editing pass. Publication date is July 13, if I haven’t mentioned. When we first discussed the editing process, I made a joke to my Loose Id editor that it was amusing to me to contemplate editing on a BDSM novella. Like, would the hero’s motivation be to tie her hands with rope at this point or would he use cuffs?

I thought it was funny.

But no. She didn’t even bite. So I mentioned it to Allison, who didn’t get why I thought it was funny, either. Now I know why. That’s exactly what the editing process was like. Was it one breast or both, which means it should be plural. If he’s busy with the one hand then he’s only holding one shoulder so he can’t release her shoulders. I swear – even UNM Press and Redbook didn’t line edit this exhaustively.

Or maybe that’s the beauty of getting galley proofs instead of a document marked with track changes. I miss my blissful ignorance.

Amusingly, many of the commas my content editor inserted, the copy editor removed. Comma placement comes down to a matter of opinion most of the time. Some people have very strong opinions on the topic. Me? Not so much.

At any rate, there I am, working my little tasks while the wren works outside my window. Bit by bit, adding to our creations.

Maybe I’m styling, too.

Simmering

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This weekend was hot.

Santa Fe broke the record high on Saturday by hitting 100. So, yeah, not so bad. And it’s a dry heat. Believe me – I lived in St. Louis for a while. Lack of humidity makes all the difference in the world.

We have nice cross-currents for air flow in our house and ceiling fans, so we never felt like we had to turn on the air conditioning. But we stayed pretty still. Even Isabel stayed inside. She’s gone from being the toddler-cat who has to be dragged in from playing, kicking and screaming, then immediately falling asleep, to teenager-cat. Friday night she spent the entire hot, still night in the garage hunting mice. Then on Saturday morning she slept in, got up to eat breakfast and went back to her kitty condo – the cat equivalent of partying all night and watching TV in the darkened den all day.

Then this storm rolled in, creating a dramatic sunset and dropping cooling rain. All of us parched people, animals and plants drank it gratefully.

I’m making steady progress on Sterling. Allison called me “quietly enthusiastic” about it. I said that’s because I’m trying not to be obnoxious. I never thought I’d be one to agree with the write-every-day thing. When I was first working at being a writer and attending every workshop I could, almost every singled writer gave that advice.

Write every day.

Write at the same time every day.

Some would shrug, apologize and say they knew it wasn’t easy, but that it was the only thing that worked for them.

I felt like that was impossible for me. At the time I was finishing my graduate thesis, working full time and taking and teaching martial arts classes most nights of the week. Even if I wrote every day, it couldn’t possibly be at the same time, because every day was different.

So I wrote when I could. Usually in sporadic chunks. I was writing essays then, so I could write an entire essay over the course of a few hours and that worked for me. My first publications came out of that time and my first book. We’d have to agree that worked just fine.

But other things still took precedence. Even gardening and quilting tended to edge out writing time. I would bemoan my lack of writing time, but there it was.

All that changed when I went to writing novels. Obviously I couldn’t bang out a novel in a few hours. I found I had to work incrementally, building the story piece by piece over the course of months, holding the ideas in my head over that time.

It took me nine months to write Obsidian. No, I didn’t work on it every day. I had several long stretches where I worked on it only a little or not at all. Sterling will take five months. And I’ve really only hit the smooth rhythm in the last two months.

But I do have to write every day. At pretty much the same time. Shockingly enough, it works. That approach also requires that the writing time is my core schedule and I work everything else in around that, even the day job (unless I just can’t make that happen, which can occur).

Some people draft faster, then revise. For me, when I’m done by mid-July, the novel will be reasonably polished.

And I keep thinking that it might be really good.

Which is this lovely bubbling feeling.

My quietly enthusiastic.

Thingummies

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Today’s Exhibit A is an anti-nature example.

About a week back, some kids dropped a trail of gummi worms on the bike/walking path. You know the kind I mean – the gel-type candy with the neon colors never found in nature.

Like this:

They seem to have been deposited on purpose, at regular intervals, decorating the path from the shopping center down past the school. It’s possibly an experiment. I know I’m sorry I haven’t taken daily photos to document the course of their non-decomposition.

I should note that we live in a fairly rural area. We’ve had coyotes and bobcats on our porch, along with various other kinds of wildlife. There’s a pretty vital cycle of life here, predation, scavenging and insectile clean-up. Nothing organic lasts long.

Yeah, you know where I’m going with this.

At first, nothing seemed to change. They glistened in the hot sun on the asphalt path for a couple of days. To all appearances ready to be plucked up and eaten.

Only nothing was eating them.

Gradually the color leached away. Apparently even those neon dyes aren’t forever. But they were still recognizably gummi worms.

Now you can see they’ve shrunk into what’s probably their original, cylindrical core. Not unlike those plastic plugs you keep in your junk drawer, not knowing what their real purpose is.

After a couple of hot days, they finally appear to be melting somewhat, though not enough to lose their distinctive shape. The ants occasionally nose at them, but carry nothing away.

The now leached worm cores melt and recongeal. Sometimes a bicycle tire swoop carries a bit away.

I fully expect them to become one with the asphalt.

Felicity

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The other day I walked past this cholla and a bird flew out with an indignant squawk.

I think it was a towhee, though I didn’t get a really good look at her, but the way she behaved made me think she had a nest. Sure enough, there it was.

I went back to the house to get the camera. It had been a little while by the time I walked back to her cholla, but she wasn’t back yet. Either that or she came back and took off again before I saw her – one spends a lot of time looking down for spiky stuff when walking in the desert.

Taking the picture wasn’t easy. Cholla would be a good substitute for lava in childhood games. the spines twist out in every direction, making it exceedingly difficult to get close. By the time I got a good angle, I could see that there was a baby bird in the nest along with egg. (It’s the pink, fuzzy bit on the seven o’clock side of the nest.)

After that I fretted about whether the mother ever came back, but I don’t want to check, just in case she did, but a third visit from me puts her off entirely.

There’s no reason to think she wouldn’t come back and every reason to think she would. I try not to worry about it.

A friend of mine from college is having a mastectomy. She’s having lumps removed, then breast reconstruction. So far as I know, she’s never used the C-word, though she refers to losing her hair and whether she’ll be a “wig-type” or a “scarf-type,” so I know she’s having chemotherapy.

It’s interesting what she’s chosen to focus on. She’s excited to get her “dream breasts” and has been taunting us with how perky she’ll be into our older years. The hair will grow back. This is a temporary illness for her.

She knows something about living with broken parts since her young son is diabetic. She’s sharing her journey with her children in the same way they’ve all shared the burden of diabetes. It’s remarkable to me. I’ve known people who never their adult children about their illnesses until it couldn’t be hidden. In this family, my friend has made it no shame, but a challenge for them all to share in.

My friend posted this poem that she wrote on Facebook.

My daughter writes the words she hears,
that confuse her
Single or paired…questions

Tumor
Surgery
Fake Boob
Chemothery
Lost Hair
Pink Ribbon

She hands me the drawing with the surgeon wearing a Joker-like smile,
a frowning me holding a handful of hair

Her eyes are concerned, but a smirk plays across her face
She and her brother start to giggle

“Fake boob”

My son asks “Will it be metal? Wood?”
“No, something squishy”
Titters

“Squishy”

Guffaws

I laugh along with the children
While it still seems like a big joke

Nature is fundamentally unfair in who gets sick, who gets tumors, who gets diabetes. We try to parse the pattern, hedge our bets, but people develop chronic diseases anyway. All we can really control is how we deal with them.

I admire how well she’s choosing not to worry about it.

Caution: Danger Ahead

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The last couple of days, we’ve had this little ground squirrel coming up to scavenge under the bird feeder.

Yesterday, as I worked at my desk, I saw him behaving kind of oddly. He bristled his tail in the air and dropped to all fours, spreading his legs and stomping the ground in a wide stance. It looked territorial, but I couldn’t see what threatened him.

He stopped and went back to eating seeds and then did it again.

I’d about decided he was just engaged in some kind of ritual display, when I saw the red snake pop his head out of the gopher hole.

That same coachwhip snake we found under the garbage can a month ago. Or, at least, I assume it’s the same snake – he doesn’t have a nametag or anything.

For a while these two faced-off, back and forth. It really surprised me, the way the little rodent bravely stood up to the snake, backing it into the hole again.

Eventually the detente ended, as many do, due to outside events. Isabel captured another mouse and brought it to me. I had to take it out the front door and the ground squirrel ran off. Shortly after that, the snake came out of the hole and glided off into the desert.

I feel like I should make analogy here, about standing up to our fears, to what threatens us, but we do anyway, don’t we? People talk a lot about how you can’t run away from stuff, but most of the time, none of us have that luxury anyway.

You have a difficult co-worker or boss, you get to deal with them every work day. Petulant teenagers ooze their petulance over everyone in their paths, leaving their families glommed like birds in an oil spill. Appliances break, crises occur, deadlines loom – and we have to deal with them.

Maybe the little ground squirrel isn’t really brave – the snake is just something he had to deal with if he wanted to eat.

In the end, they both went their own ways.

A Noble Effort

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When we awoke this morning, Isabel greeted us with a series of excited chirping meows and significant looks at the big leather armchair. This can mean only one thing.

She caught a mouse. Oh, and it had escaped, by the way, and she needed help moving the chair.

Good morning to you, too.

See, in this new house, we’re on all one level with no basement, no cellar, no crawlspace. Thus, none of my typical kitty box locations. So, David installed an insulated kitty door in the human door to the garage and I stuck the boxes out there. This makes for great nocturnal fun, what with chasing mice in the garage all night.

Then bringing them into the house.

Teddy was interested, too, but in a more academic way, since it was Isabel’s prize. We lifted the chair, Isabel nabbed the mouse, David took it from her and released it back to the wild. Now Isabel is back in the garage, looking for more.

I had lunch with one of my Boston colleagues yesterday and we talked about how people feel about their jobs. She feels disheartened at times, she said, working with people who seem to care more about what time they get to go home than about the work itself. That their jobs seem to be entirely about working their flex schedules than what they’re trying to accomplish. Worse, despite their focus on getting away from the job, some seem to not have any particular passion outside of it, either.

We’re at a funny place with our company, so it’s on her mind, what the ideal career would be. Projects are getting canceled; people are shifting around. In some ways, what project we move to is governed entirely by where the money is. But we were asking each other what we’d like to be working on anyway.

She knows I want to be a full-time writer, of course, but she wondered what in the company I’d most like to be doing. To some extent, I don’t care so much. The project I worked on for so long was one I fell into. I became an expert on the subject, but not out of any kind of passion. I like learning new fields, so really any project will do for that. I finally said I wished the company would use me more as a writer. I think it’s foolish that they don’t, but there it is.

When I returned the question to her, she said she really didn’t know. She didn’t know in college; she didn’t know when she got her Masters in International Relations, an admittedly vague field. I asked her what she’d envisioned and she thought maybe working for an NGO (non-government organization) or something.

“Ah,” I said, “something noble.”

“Yes,” she laughed, shaking her head. “That’s it – something noble.”

The question of what we all do with ourselves has a unique answer for each of us. Some of us have day jobs of varying interest to pay the bills while we indulge our true passions in slices on either side of the work day. Some of us work at whatever and live for our families. Others of us live for our careers and care for nothing else.

I think what my colleague is getting at is that she’d like to be doing something that contributes to the betterment of the world. The exact method isn’t important to her. I think that’s part of why many of us write, with the idea of giving back stories to the world.

But really, in the end, most of the things we choose to do, we do because we like doing it. Whether that’s having a job that lets you leave at 3:30 so you can pick up the kids, or having a job that gives you a thrill that you’ve saved a life.

Many writers note that the business end of it is no fun at all. I might have a noble idea of sharing my stories with the world, but the real reason I do is because I like to.

Isabel isn’t catching mice to rid our garage of rodents. She does it because it’s fun.

Compare and Contrast

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Spring has really brought out the contrasts in the landscape here.

I suppose pretty much every place but designated wilderness areas are now a hopeless mix of the indigenous and the exotic, the civilized and the natural. Still, it amuses me to see the clusters of stately hybrid tulips glowing against the desert background of cholla and pinon.

We saw an ad the other day for Cholla Busters! They promised to come remove our cholla, never to trouble us again. David asked why someone would want to get rid of their cholla and I said, you know those people who mow the desert so the space around their house looks kind of like a lawn? Those people.

This morning on our jog I pointed one out to him – flat and open, not a cholla in sight. It creates an odd image, with the house as the only visual contrast. I’ll take my camera with me to snap a photo if you all want to see. The house is on our usual route, so it wouldn’t be any trouble.

Getting back to the morning run is paying off. No, I don’t like to exercise either. But I love those results! I enter my weight and body fat into a spreadsheet every morning (love my spreadsheets!) and I’m pleased to see the body fat is trending down. I’m now at pre-Christmas levels. I know some people argue you shouldn’t weigh every day or worry about the daily values. I chart my weekly averages, too, which does give a better perspective. I’m one of those people, though, that suffer from ignorance. In the years I didn’t weigh daily, I managed to gain 20 pounds. It was quite extraordinary, as if I’d gained it overnight.

That’s what I get for not paying attention.

So, it’s good for me to track the changes over time. The days when I get unhappy news, I’m very tempted not to enter those numbers. As if, if I don’t record that high weight, that obese category body fat percentage, it won’t really exist.

(If you’ve never measured your body fat, you’d be appalled at how easy it is to be in the “obese” category. And there’s nothing above it. You get Lean, Normal, Overfat and Obese. It can be quite daunting.)

But I make myself enter those high numbers so I can see how far I’ve come. Compared to those obnoxious highs, the lows start to look pretty exciting.

I suppose Spring brings out the contrasts in me, too.

Taoist Excavations

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A dramatic arrival that produced nothing in the way of storm-action. And here I was hoping for a real gully-washer.

I spent some time this weekend digging out the culvert at the end of our driveway. We have dirt roads out in our community. Long driveways feed off the main roads and lead to the houses. Like most of the desert Southwest, we’re subject to ferocious rains. Monsoon storms drop relatively huge amounts of water, which all runs down washes that are normally dry.

In this case, water would all run down the dirt road that connects to our driveway, primarily in the borrow ditch next to the road. The only problem with that is our driveway would be in the way of that. Thus, all the driveways here have culverts at the juncture of driveway and road, to allow the water to run under.

This works just fine as long as the culvert isn’t filled with dirt.

Actually, I had two problems: a dirt-filled, neglected culvert yes, but also a wayward Direct TV van. I kid you not.

See? And you all argue with me when I say TV is evil.

During one of our last big snowstorms, a Direct TV service van slid off the dirt road and into our borrow ditch. Many people here treat deep snow as an opportunity to drive fast on crappy tires. It’s mind-boggling, really. So, this guy comes barreling down the road – yes, I saw him do it – slid all over and into the borrow ditch. Then he tried to get out. Mud fountaining up through the wet snow. We watched, since we figured our mailbox was not on his radar, but really didn’t want to have to go out and help. Finally a couple of passers-by who were much nicer than we are pulled him out with a cable and a pick-up truck.

(Incidentally, the Direct TV guy, once liberated, then attempted to pull a U-turn, though there are several ways out if you just follow the road and manage to stay on it. But no, he had to do a U-turn, that turned into something like a nine-point turn and nearly got himself stuck in opposite borrow ditch. If he had, we’d have been forced to go out and hurl his keys into the storm.)

It’s too late to make this a short story, but the end result was our ditch got torn all to hell and gone, with enormous (now dry) furrows. I seriously considered calling Direct TV and telling them to come fix it, but I decided it would be infinitely less aggravating just to dig it up myself.

Besides, I need the exercise.

Now, when I was a little girl, I tried to build a pond in the back garden. I built an earthen dam and canals, various channels, waterfalls and progressive lakes. It was a thing of beauty, I tell you. Which all promptly dissolved into sludge when I added water. My first experience with Taoism.

The great thing about Taoism is you learn lessons by observing nature. This time I paid attention to where the water would want to go and dug accordingly. Eventually I want to line the culvert area around our driveway with rocks, to make it look a little more “on-purpose.” So I cleared a space for the water to run. It doesn’t look great right now, but I have high hopes that a good gully-washer will clear the way.

If I did it right, nature will help me out this time.

It will be a thing of beauty, I tell you.

Tut Tut

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The days are starting to shift here into the warm weather pattern.

Black-bottomed cumulus clouds cruise by like Spielbergian starships hunting for a tattered group of rebels. When the rain falls, it’s both fury and benediction.

Most of my life, I’ve lived in places where the weather comes from a direction. In Denver, the clouds build up over the western mountains all day, until they build up enough gumption to pour over the top and into the basin below. We could track the approach of a winter blizzard by the recitation of pass closures in the mountains: Aspen, Vail, Rabbit Ears, Loveland. By the time Loveland Pass and maybe even Eisenhower tunnel closure, we knew it would be upon us.

It was much the same in Laramie. Not surprising because it’s part of the same geography. The weather there streamed up from the mountains. Storms in Steamboat Springs landed on us an hour later.

Every once in a once, in both Denver and Laramie, a winter storm would charge over, then slow and back up again from the east. Those were the heavy snows.

Here, the weather blows up on top of us. The wind can gust from any direction. Storms pounce from any direction. I’m no meteorologist, but I think we get wet air streaming up from the Pacific currents in the southwest that combined with the Rocky Mountain chilled air. Our humidity levels drop from 45% to 10% as the day warms. Up above, the cool dry and the warm wet foment, spinning cumulus clouds that shoot off in all directions.

I suppose I could look up the meterology, but imagining the poetry of it all is more fun.

For predictability, it’s no good at all. The forecasts are often wildly wrong.

But for drama? For the sheer delight of vista and power? Just fabulous.

You can tell which camp I’m in.

Credit Where It Isn’t Due

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We haven’t had a (serious) New Mexico wildlife shot in a while.

But now that the weather is warming up, the critters are starting to emerge again. This is a coachwhip snake. The photo doesn’t quite capture his lovely reds and pinks.

I got credit for first live snake spotting, much to David’s chagrin because he’s the king of snakes. (Isn’t there something biblical about that?)
No, seriously, in his misspent youth, David used to collect rattlesnakes for Reptile Gardens in South Dakota. For those who’ve never had the pleasure, Reptile Gardens is part zoo, part sideshow, part tourist trap. Kind of the biggest ball of twine of snakes.

And they paid by the pound. Not a bad gig for a nice kid from northern Wyoming with a knack for wildlife.

At any rate, David’s been revved to see the snakes of our new home, but so far had seen only one dead snake. I don’t get a bunch of credit for this one, though – when I rolled out the garbage can to stuff it full yard detritus, he was under there. Turns out they’re nocturnal snakes and not terribly fond of sunlight. He just laid there, all sleepy while I called David and the snake was duly identified and photographed.

It works that way sometimes – you get credit for luck, for happenstance, for stumbling upon something cool. And sometimes the things you labor over, hunt for, craft lovingly with care, no one ever cares about but you. The universe’s way of putting us in our place, I suppose.

One way to interpret the Tao Te Ching says that only those things achieved without effort are one with the Tao. The implication is also that only those things that are one with the Tao are valuable.

I think both points are debatable.

Really it all depends on what value you assign to the thing. Both what kind and how much. There’s something to be said for both the stories that drop into your lap and the ones you wrestle out of the ground. Other people may read them and assign their own values, but only the writer knows what the story means to her.

The wise writer would be thankful for both the gifts and the stories bought with blood.